This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

As a conceptual resource for rhetoric, contemporary neuroscience has considerable potential. Yet how exactly rhetoricians should deploy it as such requires careful consideration. While some engage neuroscience in a foundationalist fashion, using it to ground rhetoric in empirically tested claims, I make the case for a non-foundationalist approach, arguing that neuroscience can serve as a resource for rhetoric on the basis of epistemologies that value the speculative, indeterminate, and contingent. That is, we can use neuroscience to achieve perspective rather than proof and continued conversation rather than resolution. More specifically, I suggest placing neuroscience in incongruous contact with rhetoric, using it to achieve Burkean perspective by incongruity. I then do so in an extended example that puts Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis in incongruous contact with ancient accounts of <em>eikos</em>, thereby offering a fresh angle from which to view enduring discussions anew.